


Scéal

by HunterPeverell



Series: A Chuisle Mo Chroí [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Asexual Bucky Barnes, Asexual Character, Asexual Steve Rogers, Irish Language, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-22
Updated: 2016-07-22
Packaged: 2018-07-26 02:24:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7556413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HunterPeverell/pseuds/HunterPeverell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The thing was—The thing was, neither of them were broken. Apart, they were whole. Together they were whole, too. They could be who they were together and knew the other would love them regardless. They could feel complete in a world that told them they were broken and whisper to one another in the safety of the dark, saying, “I love you,” and know it to be true.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scéal

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Pahar (Totu-i vis şi armonie)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2752604) by [itsmylifekay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/itsmylifekay/pseuds/itsmylifekay). 



> A/N: Title means “Story, account, narrative, tale, piece of news, state of affairs.” It's Irish.  
> This is a bit like a teaser for the rest of the series. It’ll be a bunch of one-shots, and some of the scenes that will follow will be included or explained in the rest of the series. Please comment, kudo, or subscribe. I’ll keep writing these. Please also keep in mind I can’t write for all asexual people. This is more my experience as an ace and how I look at a very sexual world.  
> I also noticed while reading through it that a lot of the themes are similar to Pahar. This wasn't intentional, but since I love that story, it's no skin off my back to say that this story was heavily influenced/inspired by Pahar. Go read it if you haven't!

The thing was—

****

Steve awoke at dawn, his heart beating and sweat coating his skin in a fine sheen. His pajama bottoms had hitched up around his thighs over the course of the night and had pressed marks into his skin.

Beside him, Bucky stirred.

“Steve?”

Steve glanced over at Bucky, whose face was smashed into the pillow, inches from Steve.

“I’m fine, chuisle mo chroí,” Steve murmured. Bucky leaned over and snuffled against Steve’s shoulder before falling back asleep, faint gusts of air puffed out against Steve’s skin. Steve couldn’t remember what the nightmare had been, but it hardly mattered. It could have been anything from an alley, dingy and rotten-smelling, to his mother’s skull-like face, pasty white with sunken, dark eyes.

Steve closed his eyes and drifted off once more, listening to Bucky’s breathing.

****

The thing was, neither of them were broken.

****

“Y’know,” a fifteen year-old Bucky said, flopping onto Steve’s bed, making him bounce slightly. Steve looked up, curious. “My dad’s been askin’ ‘bout my girlfriend.”

“Which one?” Steve asked as he went back to his outline. It was for a history paper and Steve needed it to be good. He needed to pass.

He felt Bucky shrug—it caused the sheets to ripple and scrunch up against his legs even more. “Heck if I know.”

Steve stopped writing and glared down at Bucky. “You better be treatin’ them right, Buck.”

Bucky held up his hands. “I am, I am! Geeze, Steve, I swear to God I am. It’s just, they come and go so fast, y’know?”

“No,” Steve said shortly.

Bucky bit his lip and sighed gustily through his nose.

They sat in silence until Bucky said, “I think Macy wants me to do it with her.”

“Do what?” Steve blinked, not understanding.

“Have sex,” Bucky clarified. “I think she wants me to have sex with her.”

Steve tried to think about sex, how it would work, who he’d like to be with. It didn’t work, he didn’t think—there were faceless things pressing up against him and it felt more like a fight than anything else. Steve knew how people thought about sex, having listened to his fellows at school, witnessed it on TV. He just … He couldn't picture himself _part_ of it.

“Okay,” he said, going back to his outline. “Have fun, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, not sounding particularly enthused.

****

Apart, they were whole.

****

Steve first had a notion when he was thirteen. He looked around at his classmates and didn’t understand why they giggled and flirted and dated. They all seemed to be on the same page, and Steve felt like he had missed out on a manual, something that would tell him how he was supposed to act, what he was supposed to know, what to _feel_. He felt left behind.

“You’re just a late bloomer, sweetheart,” his mother would tell him if he ever brought it up. She would smile kindly, lovingly, and Steve would smile back. She was his mother, she knew. He was late, that was it.

He didn’t know she was wrong, not then.

At the time, however, he agreed with her and went back to his art. There was nothing he could do but wait for his hormones to kick in, really. It was a comforting thought as Steve wondered what it would be like to be on the same page as everyone else.

Thirteen, eighth grade, was the year Bucky came, all smiles and laughter. He flirted and joked and looked, just like everyone else. Unlike everyone else, though, he noticed Steve.

“Y’know,” he told Steve one day, before they were really friends, “Cindy’s been giving you a second look.”

“What?” Steve asked, brow furrowing. Bucky stared at him expectantly.

Steve hesitated. Then said, carefully shaping each word, “I don’t think I get what you mean.”

Bucky blinked, but to his credit didn’t even hesitate in saying, “She wants to kiss you.”

“Oh.” Steve didn’t know what to make of that and hoped Bucky would change the subject. There was an awkward pause before Steve added, “Okay.” He didn't know what else he was supposed to say.

Bucky let it drop.

Steve waited all high school to get those feelings, waited for the start of each school year as though, magically, one day, he’d understand what everyone was talking about. What everyone else felt.

There were other things to occupy his time, during the wait. His art grew—he experimented a lot, really, during those four years. He dragged Bucky to every art museum and gallery in the city. Bucky went, every time. He would watch Steve talk about this and that, a soft expression playing at his features. They would smile at one another until Steve became distracted by a new work of art, a new piece of history. Then he’d light up and drag Bucky over, speaking rapidly, animatedly.

He watched shows, he read books, he attended his lessons.

He waited to feel normal.

Steve would watch the people around him fall in and out of lust, giggling quietly to each other in the hallways between classes or intertwined in the cafeteria. He tried to be patient.

Bucky seemed to have no problem. He dated and laughed and giggled and held hands and explored beneath skirts and under pants and seemed to be having the time of his life.

Steve felt left out, but he couldn’t bring himself to feel very upset. He had no idea what everyone else was feeling, and he couldn’t understand it.

For all that he was different, Steve felt normal.

****

Together they were whole, too.

****

“Stevie,” his mother murmured. Her Irish accent, still present even though she had left her homeland nearly twenty years ago, was hoarse and ragged with suppressed pain.

Senor year. The year she died. She was already pale, that late afternoon in October, though she wouldn’t die until March. Steve sat near her, sketching the delicate veins in her hand, the tendons and divots in the skin.

Bucky was out on a date.

“Yeah, ma?” Steve asked. His voice was quiet. Their voices were quiet. The house was quiet—everything prepared for the eventual, inevitable death of Sarah Rogers.

“You got anyone special, a leanbh?”

He could hear the concern in her voice. The desperate wish to leave Steve alone with someone to love him.

Steve blinked at her, his glasses perched on his nose. The many pages of paper stack atop one another pressed into his skin, just shy of actual pain. He clutched his pencil and stared unseeingly at her trembling hands. His lips, chapped and flaking, rubbed against one another as he sucked in every breath, a wheeze in the back of his throat.

“No, ma,” he said eventually.

Her eyes were gentle with worry.

“I’m fine, ma, I’m happy,” Steve tried.

She didn’t believe him, even though Steve was telling the truth.

When she died, Steve broke. He didn’t want to go to class, didn’t want to do his art. The apartment’s rent had been paid off until July—his mother refused treatment the last three months of her life. The rest of the extra money had been put towards college—the extra plus the money she had already saved would get him through most of college, so long as the tuition was cheap.

“Why waste money on the dead?” she had asked when Steve had found out she was refusing treatment and confronted her. His ma hadn't told him what she had done with the leftover money, but now he knew. Now he was in charge of it.

He was the last Rogers.

He was emancipated—that had been finalized the last month of her life. He was only seventeen. He had no one but himself, now.

Well, almost no one.

Bucky found him at home the Saturday after her funeral. He let himself in with the spare key and sat down next to Steve on the window seat. It had been his ma’s favorite place in the apartment.

“We looked for you,” Bucky said quietly.

“I know,” Steve said, voice hoarse from tears long since shed. “I wanted to be alone.”

“Past tense,” Bucky noted, pressing his thigh against Steve’s. “Mind if I stay?”

Steve shook his head. Bucky didn’t say anything, just sat there in silence with Steve until the sky grew dark and the few, faint stars dared to show their faces. It was almost like their trips to the library, when they were younger—just Steve, Bucky, and the quiet.

When Steve could no longer see the street below him, that was when Bucky took Steve’s hand and led him out the door. They went to a small diner they had both been to a handful of times.

“Steve,” Bucky said when the food arrived—pancakes, a fruit bowl, and potato squares.

“’M not hungry,” Steve muttered.

“Please eat,” Bucky said. “Please.”

Steve looked at Bucky, looked at the way his forehead creased with concern and his shoulders were tense with stress. His best friend looked wrung out—Ma had been like a second mother to him. His eyes were red-rimmed with a lack of sleep, and patchy stubble covered the lower half of his face.

Steve ate a bite of the potatoes. Bucky accepted that. They ate their late dinner in silence and afterwards Bucky led Steve back to the apartment and climbed into the bed behind Steve. They fell asleep almost immediately.

After that, Bucky spent more and more time with Steve. Steve returned to school but this time Bucky stayed with him rather than haring off after his newest conquest.

“Do you miss them?” Steve asked one day. It was raining outside, April showers.

“Who?” Bucky asked, distracted by a paragraph in his journal that needed reworking.

“The girls, the guys,” Steve elaborated. “The dating—the kissing.”

“Oh,” Bucky said, looking up. He met Steve’s eyes while he thought. Then, looking back down at the page, Bucky said, “No.”

Though Bucky hadn’t looked him in the eyes, Steve didn’t hear any lie—and he knew what a lying Bucky sounded like. Steve tucked a small smile out of Bucky's sight, pleased for a reason he didn't understand.

And that was that.

The students around them seemed to accept Steve and Bucky were dating now—something many of them said was “a long time coming.”

Neither Steve nor Bucky discouraged these rumors. Neither saw the point. Bucky wasn’t going to date again—school was almost over. Steve just looked the other way and said nothing. The rumors weren’t harming him beyond the few slurs tossed their way. Bucky’s continued popularity prevented much of that, anyway.

They graduated on an overcast Thursday. 

Steve smiled exactly once, during the Barnes family picture. 

Bucky was all smiles.

****

They could be who they were together

****

They’re in class. It was a Friday, and hardly anyone was paying attention to the professor. Steve and Bucky sit near the back next to the wall closest to the door. They’ve both got their notebooks out, but only Bucky was pretending to take notes. Steve has got a recorder out and its little red light blinked quietly on the desk.

Steve doodled on his hands, little swirls that don’t mean anything. Bucky has a few stray ones as well, on his right hand, the hand Steve can reach. Each time Steve absently traces the tip of his pen over Bucky’s skin Bucky stilled his hand and waited for Steve to finish. There are a few eyes, the tip of the professor’s nose, beams of light and dancing dust motes.

Bucky was half-writing his class notes, half-working on the next chapter for his story. Steve’s eyes catch on the words, spellbound by the few sentences he can read. A smile curves his lips.

They leave class with their hands tangled together, their bags slung over their shoulders, and their heads unconsciously bent towards each other. Bucky’s a few inches taller than Steve, but neither notices. Neither cares.

“C’mon,” Yolanda complained later that night at their usual bar. It was a cozy place, all things considered. The lights were low enough to create an almost smoky atmosphere, though no smoking was allowed. The wooden walls were posted with pictures from customers over the years—Steve’s favorite was a couple, faces blotted out with time, standing at the ruins of a castle long overgrown with moss and partially submerged in a pool of water.

Steve and Bucky sat tucked away in a corner, round table between them and their friends.

“I’m not getting any action,” Yolanda continued. “ _None_. Steve and Bucky get more action than I do!”

Jimmy and Stella make small noises of sympathy while Steve traced designs onto Bucky’s wrist. Bucky ducked his head down, and Steve could feel his smile on his skin. Neither said anything.

A lot of people like asking who tops, what sort of thing they get up to in bed. Those people are the insensitive ones, the ones who don’t give a shit about other people’s privacy. Steve likes to rant about them in private, but when facing them, all his does is give them a bored expression.

Steve likes to fight, but he finds that people are put off when he looks at them like the scum of the earth. Like they’re pathetic. They shrink and stutter, and it’s as though Steve’s six-foot-tall and rippling with muscle instead of the scrawny guy he really is.

“Just askin’,” some mutter. Others look away, uncomfortable. It's the ones who are unrepentant, who stare him down as if daring him to do something, that he fights if Bucky isn't there to stop him.

“Sure,” Bucky would say to each one, trying to prevent Steve from swinging his fists. His smile and tone are charming, his countenance charismatic. “But that don’t make it any of your damned business.”

Bucky’s solid presence next to Steve puts most of them off, prevents them from taking a swing at them. Steve and Bucky smile then, one aggressive and spiteful, one charming and deadly, before turning away.

Later, in the safety of their apartment, they crawl into bed and pull the covers up so they’re in their own tiny, private space. Steve rants and raves while Bucky agrees. They exhaust themselves and fall asleep cocooned in their own cave of fabric.

Their friends, not the close ones like Jimmy, Stella, and Yolanda, have learned not to ask, even though Steve can tell they’re dying to know what their gay friends are up to in their spare time.

Hardly anyone ever believes them when they tell the truth.

But Bucky and Steve don’t care.

****

and knew the other would love them regardless.

****

Steve doesn’t hear the term until after they graduate.

He doesn’t pay much attention to it, at first. Sex Ed. is a joke, it really is, and everything he learned came from his peers or the Internet. They don't talk about sex for anyone other than heterosexuals, and Steve doesn't even find the topic all that interesting. Of course be safe, and how hard is it to just not? Really, he doesn't understand people. But that's just him, and he knows there are kids in his school who need to know about sex that _isn't_ between a man and a woman. He first knew about homosexuals in eighth grade, the year he met Bucky. Someone asked him if he was gay because he wore tight pants. Steve, confused, said no. He didn’t know what gay was, but with the predatory gleam in his classmate’s eye he knew it was something bad.

His ma explained it to him, later that night when he came to her, confused and scared.

“It ain’t anything bad.” She carded her slender fingers through his hair. “It ain’t, a leanbh. People will tell you it is, but that’s because they’re too scared to understand.”

“Why does it matter?” Steve asked, wide eyed. “Why do people care?”

“Oh sweetheart,” his ma said and brought him closer to her chest. He was getting to big for that, but he snuggled into her warmth nevertheless. “People like making other people’s lives their deal. It’s why we’ve got crap telly and gossip mags.”

“But it ain’t any of their business.”

“You know that and I know that,” his ma murmured. “But we’re not like everyone else. We’ve got morals, we’ve got respect. We care about _people_.”

“But everyone should care.”

His ma pressed a kiss to the top of his head. “I know.” She sounded so sad.

Steve learned about lesbians a few months later and bisexuals a few months after that. He didn’t pay much attention—he didn’t, really, to those kinds of things. He was young, and he had school and his ma’s failing health to worry about.

His hormones never kicked in. Senior year rolled around and Steve was the same as he had ever been, so much so that he didn’t even notice. His classmates whispered, calling him prude or picky. Steve didn’t care—he still didn’t see the big deal. Why care about emotions he couldn’t understand and didn’t experience when he could draw or read or hang out with Bucky?

His life was simpler, really, compared to others.

Steve was as content as he could be.

****

They could feel complete in a world that told them they were broken

****

Steve was fifteen when Tony Stark, the famous billionaire, went missing in Afghanistan.

It was his Sophomore year, and the year he was just starting to get into social justice, when he happened to see an article about a gay boy beaten to death on the rack near the checkout at the market a few streets away.

Steve was angry about a lot, then. He was angry about how people were treated because of their skin color, their sexual orientation, their religion. He was angry his fellow humans were shallow creatures and he was angry that people were forced to be poor so the select few could be rich.

Tony Stark being one of the select few.

Steve did not mourn his disappearance beyond the fact that Obadiah Stane now seemed to be in charge and seemed, if possible, even more sleazy and shady than Stark.

It was around Steve’s birthday when Stark returned under mysterious circumstances. Becca kept him up to date as Steve refused to give the man more hits than he was already getting.

He did, however, watch the press conference where Stark shut down his weapons program over and over again on YouTube, just as he watched Stark announce he had made a weapon just for himself, claiming it wasn’t a weapon for all that if could kill people.

“What a fucking hypocrite,” he told Bucky as they lazed about Steve’s room, a journal in Bucky’s hands and a sketch pad in Steve’s. “Just—how does he live with himself?”

Bucky frowned down at his paper.

“Y’know,” he said. “If I was to make Stark a character, wanna hear how I’d make him like that?”

“Yeah,” Steve said.

“I mix one neglectful father with one loving but distant mother, have them die under horrible, mysterious circumstances so that the character would never get closure, then have the character tear himself up with grief and drown themselves in liberal amounts of alcohol. They would both hate and miss their father and rarely, if ever, speak of their mother. Then shake that up with having more money than love their entire lives and the inability to truly connect with real human beings around them, and you’d get Tony Stark.”

Steve considered this. “Didn’t Becca say Stark and Potts were a thing?”

Bucky shrugged. “Who the fuck cares? It don’t matter either way. What matters is the fact that even if they are a thing, it’s not going to be what a real relationship could be. Potts is fucking busy basically running his company for him—”

“He should just make her in charge.”

“—and Stark is selfish. Eventually, Potts is gonna grow tired of it. It ain’t Starks fault, not really. That whole nature nurture thing, but still. He’s selfish.”

Steve sighed. “He needs brakes. He’s gonna invent something bad, and no one’s gonna stop him ‘cause no one tells him ‘no.’”

“Yeah, I know,” Bucky said, looking over at Steve and holding his gaze.

Over the years they witness super humans coming to light, aliens attacking their home, and one disaster after another.

Then—

“Why are you stalking us?”

****

and whisper to one another in the safety of the dark, saying,

****

They move out of their tiny apartment once they graduated college, diplomas in hand. They already had another apartment lined up, the rent saved up for, their names on the lease. It’s 2015, and Steve is twenty-two, Bucky is twenty-three. It took them longer than they had realized to graduate—Steve had to fail one semester because of a terrible bout of pneumonia.

But it was their home, now. It was theirs, and Steve couldn’t be happier.

Yolanda, Jimmy, and Stella had helped them move in and then took them out for drinks to celebrate, but now it was just Steve and Bucky and the darkness around them.

Bucky pulled him in for a kiss. “Can you believe it?”

“No,” Steve breathed, burying his face into the crook of Bucky’s neck. “God, I don’t know what we’re doing.

“No one does,” Bucky said. “I’m just so fucking glad I’m with you.”

“Me, too,” Steve said and kissed Bucky once more. “I’m so lucky to have you.”

Bucky smiled, humor glinting in his eyes. “I’m lucky to have me, too.”

Steve whacked his shoulder. “My god, you’re a fucking jerk.”

“Yeah, yeah, and you’re a punk.” Bucky laughed and pulled Steve closer so that their heartbeats mingled together.

****

“I love you,” and know it to be true.

****

After senior year, before they head off to college, they gave up ma’s apartment in July and moved into together. It’s close to the school they want to go to. The school itself wasn’t that big of a deal—though they both had brains and talent, neither wanted much for themselves. They already had enough.

Bucky studied English, Steve studied art. They minored in history so they could be in some classes together.

They curled around each other at night, their hearts beating, and they breathe, eyes closed and limbs tangled together.

“Mo shíorghrá,” Steve will whisper, tracing the skin above Bucky’s heart.

Bucky kisses his forehead. “Mo shíorghrá,” he returns.

Steve closes his eyes and sleeps.

**Author's Note:**

> a leanbh - Baby, or child.
> 
> Mo shíorghrá - My eternal love
> 
> I know the format for this story was a little weird, but the rest of the series won't be like it. Just, uh, bear with it?


End file.
